“Without God, Anything is Permissible” (3/3)
Description
Christian thinkers have argued for millennia that only God can give objective grounds for the transcendent moral law. Fyodor Dostoyevsky flips that equation in the face of the death of God in Russia, “Without God, anything is permissible.” That is, if God doesn’t exist, there is no such thing as an act that is off limits, immoral or evil. Dostoyevsky warned that if Russia tries to live out the European Enlightenment worldview, then society will quickly realize that a godless universe is a lawless universe.
Episode Notes
- The featured painting is an oil on canvas portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov in 1872.
- The featured piece is by Sergey Rachmaninov, a Russian composer of the 19th century. The piece is called Piano Concerto #2 in C Minor, Op. 18. Rachmaninov escaped Russia after the socialist revolution of 1918 and settled in the United States. It seemed fitting to select a Russian composer who fled Russia following the socialist revolution after the totalitarianism which Dostoyevsky predicted would rise affected Rachmaninov personally.